Even Quicker Reply to Cabri

[Poorly spelled, poorly grammared, rushed thoughts to Louis Cabri's recent posts to the Buffalo Poetics List. I had really meant to deal with Louis' writing about form in Silliman's Non but found what he wrote a bit confusing in the end. You can read his entire post here. I'm just confused about what he means about form in the early part of the email, but I'll leave it for now as I've just rented Punch Drunk Love.]

Just some comments on what Loius had written about Ron's poem a few days back. He is comment on the following from NON:

                               Titles
               are often misleading,
               subtitles seldom are.
                                       Checking
                               out the driver
                               in the next car
               through my rear view mirror
                               at a stop light
                               (one never sees
               the lower body),
            thin ebony man
                with a long white beard,
                        tricolor rasta cap,
            high sharp cheekbones
          that cause the eyes to recede.
               I decide he's a gentle person.
          Rolls of roofing
                      turned upright,
                        black cylinders atop the gravel.
                                                 There comes a moment
                                                whenever
                                    I read my poem when
                                                it is apparent
                                    it is terrible
                                                 I'm a fraud,
                                  no one would ever
                                       choose to hear
                                    or to read this,
                but then this moment of panic passes. (N/O 60)

LC writes:

"When you read the sentences as discreet units, it's pretty straight-forwardly denotational. But, reading the gaps between these sentences render the sentences completely wild, unpredicted (since the text is so overdetermined with details, it would be impossible to stay in control of their interconnections), unconscious even. Here Silliman reads the "subtitle" of the guy in the car behind him, whose "title" refers to his physical description: "thin ebony man," etc. So, the guy is black, and is advancing on the white narrator, but the "advance" (i.e. suddenly we are no longer in a world of pure, objective-seeming denotation!) is benign ("he's a gentle person"): one can go allegorical here. This "advance" is benign probably because the man is old (eyes receding somewhat) just like the narrator admits of himself (and this ties again to the opening motif of old form). Now the next juxtaposition: how does one account for it? It has to be accounted for. The juxtaposition are not themselves arbitrary: the stanzas/sentences are. The skin color of the older gentleman who is in a car behind the narrator-driver now becomes (and at the same time importantly does _not_ become) the black color of roofing tiles!!? This image's social evaluation is very ambiguous. It is work-to-be-done, of _new_ roofing and of refurbishing - but, is it regentrification, or evidence of upward mobility (whose?), or completely unrelated to housing and instead about industrial expansion (we don't know the narrator's location)? This image becomes the next "title," and its "subtitle" is the following sentence, which seems to carry the emotions the narrator experiences at the sight of the roofing material: self-doubt about his own work-to-be-done as poet. The syntactic wonkiness of the middle phrases of this sentence ("whenever / I read my poem when / it is apparent / it is terrible") mirrors its subject, self-doubt."

It almost seems to me that Ron went back and changed the first "black" to "ebony" in order not to have the words appear twice in two successive sentences. If we were to read this as a social text the way you would choose (your reading reflects some elements of Jeff Derksen's idea of "rearticulation" as a development of the new sentence), then you would have to read the word "Ebony" (capital "e") in the use of the word -- i.e. this guy has somehting to do with the magazine. The use of "ebony" just stuck out at me here as more a matter of creating a euphemism rather than a stylistic flourish, since there's so little here that represents an interest in stylistic flourishes of this sort -- it's all kind of "Man pounds rice" language. Just like the "the landlord" and "a dog" in other parts of the poem. (Ron's turn to a belle-lettrist tone on his blog is curious to me for this very reason -- he never seemed to have an interest in elements of what might be called "fancy" in his prose or even poetry, but all of a sudden there is this range of affects.)

When nouns and noun phrases get pared down like this they can often, ironically, become quite riddled with symbolism, and indeed your reading of this slab of NON points to all sorts of correspondences between the sentences and stanzas that are nearly as intricate as what is often said to occur in "Skunk Hour" (or Eliot's Four Quartets, whose language is nearly devoid of adjectives that serve a visual purpose). I've never been much of a symbol guy myself -- the thing is quite often the thing to me, so if the use of the word "ebony" doesn't let me get closer to what it is Ron is seeing -- and my claim here is that he is seeing *less* because he's had to use a quick replacement word to get away from using "black" twice (merely my suspicion, of course) -- well, I guess I just don't see how "ebony" improves upon what it is we're seeing here. [PS: if he's comparing this person to something made of ebony then I'd really be hut and blathered... I write as I move my jaundiced hand across the ivory skin of my girlfriend...]

Take "Fairy decorator" as a contrast -- I never read this as a reference to the decorator's sexuality but I see it now, I always just heard "fairy godmother" and assumed it was a comment on the privileged status of those for whom all things appear to be gifts -- despite the semantic slippage Louis writes about elsewhere, I somehow *see* this a whole lot more. Maybe it's just synaesthesia -- I have a tendency to see color in a lot of phrasing that is technically "colorless". I'm also, like Jeffrey (?), not sure how cheeks make the eyes recede, though I understand this as a painterly flourish -- an unspoken "as if." (Ron often suggested in early interviews that his new sentence prose was an attempt to work into the space of a novel, so I wonder why he doesn't encourage some more novelistic traits in his writing -- wouldn't Nabokov have really tried to nail this visual detail?) But the following observation from a WCW poem (“Catholic Bells”) which just drops out of the sky really impresses me:

(the

grapes still hanging to
the vines along the nearby
Concordia Halle like broken
teeth in the head of an

old man)

The very frailty of these words hanging in the stanza (an isolated by me here) suggest these grapes also. (I was raised in Rutherford and never heard of "Concordia Halle" but isn't there a Concordia grape?)

Anyway, curiously, your reading of this stanza goes up against what I thought were some of the prinicples of the New Sentence, which is that the sentences were paratactic and would not be subsumed under a montage type of functionality -- we see the titles, the titles appear on the cab, the man is black, the tiles are black, etc... -- but rather thwarted narrative and syllogistic connections. The line "I decide he's a gentle person." seems to suggest that the poet wants us to play with a cause-and-effect determination here, a game I like. So I guess the new sentence doesn't have to be entirely "paratactic" (I think it works best when there is wavering), but it seems to me that if such an overdtermined matrix of social meanings as you present here were underlying such passages of the New Sentence, then rather than the author permitting a play of meanings for the reader in his or her poem, asking the reader to be creative, the writer is merely making it much harder to see this matrix of meanings by not elaborating the connex.

I don't think this passage is so carefully written as to suggest that -- connections are happy to occur, but you see some counter-charges within the mass -- "ebony" slipping in to show that he author is aware of lexical repeats -- the phrase "Titles are often misleading, subtitles seldom are" seems vague to me (so "President" is misleading because because the person is not actually presiding, but they "Hey you jerk!" under a flurry of Spanish curses is accurate?) -- etc. I like the line about the doubt and the way it comes in after all of this detail from "outside" -- ok, I know it sounds like I'm just harshing on Ron's poetry but it's really just this poem and how it relates to his ideas, especially what he's writing these days.

Posted by Brian Stefans at July 14, 2003 07:53 PM | TrackBack